The 2014

Industry Survey

From the distracting flutter of Hummingbird to the deafening silence of (not provided), the past year was eventful for the online marketing industry. Once again, we set out to discover how the year's changes impacted your jobs, clients, and tactics. Over 3,700 of you participated in this year's industry survey (thank you!), and we've compiled the
results below. Across the board, content marketing is on the rise and fewer and fewer of you are actively link-building. Even in the wake of (not provided), keyword research and rank-tracking are still a big part of many of your jobs. Budgets for tools are increasing, and demand for services is strong.

Demographics & Stats

Shrinking gender gap

While our respondents were still predominantly male (71%), the gender gap seems to be shrinking across our last three industry surveys:

Strong international presence

Even as a Seattle-based company, roughly half of our respondents (51%) reported living outside of the United States. Almost half of respondents (47%) reported optimizing for 2+ languages.

Top 10 Countries

United States - 49.5%

United Kingdom - 16.0%

India - 6.6%

Canada - 4.0%

Australia - 3.0%

Spain - 2.1%

Netherlands - 1.9%

Germany - 1.8%

Italy - 0.8%

Bulgaria- 0.7%

Salaries by role/experience

Engineering and UX roles led the way for top median salaries, with design and development jobs trailing. Even in our relatively young industry, people with more experience commanded much higher salaries (note: salaries were calculated from the midpoint of the survey ranges, and data includes international respondents).

Median salary by role

Engineering

$99,400

User Experience

$83,958

E-Commerce

$74,727

Web Analytics

$74,375

Marketing

$73,034

PPC

$69,010

Inbound Marketing

$67,893

SEM

$64,460

SEO

$60,215

Content

$55,833

Web Development

$53,972

Public Relations

$51,500

Social Media

$49,167

Web Design

$47,962

Median salaryby experience

< 1 year

$33,078

1-2 years

$38,196

2-3 years

$47,431

3-5 years

$58,388

5-10 years

$86,253

10+ years

$123,403

Top marketing activities

In the past year, analytics still led the way for marketing activities. Interestingly, very few respondents (1.6%) listed their primary field as "Web Analytics". Analytics are a way of life across all online marketing fields. Content marketing jumped a few spots (from #5 in 2012 to #2 this year), although this may be due to broader adoption of the term. Link building fell out of the top 5, and despite the Penguin uproar, link removal was at the bottom of our list, with 54% of respondents reporting spending no time at all on it. Even with (not provided) in full gear, keyword research still made it easily into the top 5.

Top 5 activities:

1. Analytics

2. Content Marketing

3. Keyword Research

4. Social Media Marketing

5. Brand Strategy

Top marketing metrics

Marketers use a lot of metrics—of the 12 metrics we listed, 10 were rated as “Important” or “Extremely Important” by over 50% of respondents. Rankings were still considered “Somewhat Important” or better by almost 92% of respondents. They were still considered "Important" or "Extremely Important" by 73% of respondents. Rankings are far from dead.

Top 5 metrics

1. Conversions

2. Revenue

3. Leads

4. Unique Visits

5. Rankings

In-house vs. Agency vs. Consultant

People self-identifying as in-house came out on top in this year’s data, at 41%, followed by agency folks at 31%, business owners at 15%, and independent consultants at 10%. In terms of their daily activities, social media was less of a priority for agency marketers than either in-house or independent consultants. Content led the way for independent consultants, although it was in the top 5 for all 3 groups. Not surprisingly, managing people was a higher priority for agency marketers, as was doing site audits for clients.

Top 5 activities for in-house

1. Analytics

2. Content Creation

3. Social Media Marketing

4. Keyword Research

5. Brand Strategy

Top 5 activities for agency

1. Analytics

2. Keyword Research

3. Site Audits

4. Content Creation

5. Managing People

Top 5 activities for independents

1. Content Creation

2. Analytics

3. Social Media Marketing

4. Keyword Research

5. Brand Strategy

SEO, Social & Content

This year, we broke up our follow-on questions into three major sections: SEO, Social, and Content. Even with the industry’s many new catchphrases, 78% of respondents still reported doing SEO as part of their job. Almost half (49%) reported being responsible for content marketing, and a bit under half (41%) said they were involved in social marketing.

Top tools for SEOs

We decided to reintegrate free and paid tools into just one question, to simplify analysis. Screaming Frog gained a lot of ground—in 2012, 10% reported using the paid version and 18% the paid version; this year, total usage was almost 49%. The search engine's own webmaster tools remain very popular. Yoast and Ahrefs were new to the list and came in strong (starting in the top 10). Please note, of course, that as much as we love our own tools, we have to assume that our audience is a bit biased.

Top SEO tools

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Coping with (not provided)

The loss of Google keyword data hit hard in 2013, and so we asked people how they’re coping, strategically speaking. It’s interesting to note that, on average, respondents selected three different solutions. It's going to take a diversity of solutions to solve this problem. Respondents who track >100 keywords were more likely to rely on rankings and less likely to rely on social signals than those who track <100 keywords.

Top 5 coping strategies

68.8%

Focus on conversion rate and performance metrics

66.2%

Focus on landing-page traffic

57.9%

Rely more on Google Webmaster Tools data

40.5%

Try to estimate traffic based on other data

36.7%

Focus on social signals (Tweets, Likes, +1s, etc.)

Top social platforms

Not surprisingly, Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ led the way as the top 3 social media marketing channels. Facebook and Twitter usage were pretty close to 2012, but Google+ increased from 55% of respondents in 2012 to 70% this year. Google+ is definitely getting traction, at least within the marketing community. Pinterest was another winner—up from 21% in 2012 to 28% this year. Interestingly, fewer marketers reported using YouTube—down from 49% to 38%.

Top 10 platforms

Facebook - 90.9%

Twitter - 85.1%

Google+ - 69.8%

LinkedIn - 46.6%

Company Blog - 46.0%

YouTube - 38.3%

Pinterest - 28.2%

Instagram - 10.6%

Tumblr - 4.1%

Reddit - 3.4%

Top tools for social

In 2012, nearly 20% of respondents reported not using any social media tools. This year, that number was down to 11%. Buffer moved into the top 10, with just under 14% of respondents using it (up from just under 4% in 2012).

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Top 10 content tools

In the fairly new realm of content tools, 15% of respondents reported not using any tools. Google dominated the list, with Google/G+ tools taking up the top 4. HARO has proven popular among many marketers, both for content opportunities and to monitor content trends (including what competitors will be writing about).

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Budgets are on the rise

Some good news for the industry: overall budgets for marketing tools are clearly on the rise. In 2012, only a third of respondents reported monthly budgets of $500 or more. This year, that number was up over half of respondents (54%). More than a tenth (11%) of respondents reported budgets greater than $10K/month for marketing tools, and almost a quarter (24%) had monthly budgets over $3K.

Content marketing trends

As reported above, content creation was a top-5 activity for every major group of marketers in this year’s survey. Almost four-fifths (79%) of consultants reported offering content creation as a service (second only to analytics at 85%). Content marketing was also reported to have the highest year-over-year demand increase, with 71% of respondents reporting increased demand.